The MOVE Bombing
Pennsylvania
On May thirteenth, nineteen eighty-five, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb on a residential block. The target was a house at sixty-two twenty-one Osage Avenue occupied by members of MOVE, a Black liberation group that had been in a long conflict with city authorities. A Pennsylvania State Police helicopter dropped the device onto the roof.
What followed was catastrophic. An uncontrolled fire spread through the neighborhood. Eleven people inside the house were killed, including five children.
Sixty-one homes were destroyed. No police officer or city official was ever criminally charged. A later investigation called it a tragedy not an accident, and found the decision to allow the fire to burn a gross negligence.
The bombing remains one of the most extreme acts of domestic law enforcement in American history.
